Hey guys. After the last thread I decided to try and make one topical thread a day. If it works then great, if not I'll try switching to a thread a week. And so for the fist official thread I ask: What other holidays do ponies emulate? There's Hearths Warming to our Christmas, Nightmare Night to our Halloween, and that's all we really know. What holidays would you like to see done the pony way, of if there's one I missed talk about here!

I made a calendar for the MLP universe once, and I mapped some holidays onto it.

My Equestrian calendar is divided into twelve thirty-day months. Each has a holiday on the first day of the month.
1st month: Wintermarch (Holiday: First Day) - analogous to New Year's Day.
2nd month: Bloomingtide (Holiday: Winter Wrap-Up)
3rd month: Wellspring (Holiday: Fire-Flower Festival)
4th month: Cloudreach (Holiday: Hearts and Hooves Day) - analogous to Valentine's day.
5th month: Ambrosia (Holiday: Summerdawn)
6th month: Highsun (Holiday: Summer Sun Celebration) - analogous to midsummer/solstice celebrations.
7th month: Summerwane (Holiday: Starbright)
8th month: Warmwind (Holiday: Running of the Leaves)
9th month: Stormborn (Holiday: Nightmare Night) - analogous to Halloween.
10th month: Goldleaf (Holiday: Harvest's End) - I'm thinking a bonfire night, with outdoor gatherings for feasts and cider-drinking.
11th month: Firstfall (Holiday: Snowmoot)
12th month: Hoarfrost (Holiday: Hearth's Warming) - analogous to Christmas.

I haven't really thought out how all of them would be celebrated (the non-canon ones, anyway) and this seems like a decent place to start thinking about it. I suppose I only have names for some of them, but it's as good a starting point as any. Plus, additional holidays don't necessarily need to map onto this timeline. For example, Celestia's birthday might be a public holiday like the Queen's birthday weekend is in Commonwealth countries here.

This seems like as good a thread as any to discuss filling in the blanks.

3873520
12... 30 day months...but wouldn't that mean equestria's year is longer than earth's year? equestria would have a slightly larger orbit than earth for their equivalent to February to have a full 30 days

6226663
The Equestrian year is exactly 360 days, compared to our own 365. It also does not have leap-years. The planet's orbit would have to be slightly smaller than Earth's if that were the case, though it's a minuscule difference in astronomical terms.

6227164
But then a thought strikes me. Given that we've seen the sun speed up when Celestia 'lowers' it, going from almost stationary to visibly travelling across the sky, the planet would need an astonishingly good inertial dampening system to avoid something like this happening every time Celestia started a new day - if the sun appears to change velocity relative to the planet, the logical assumption is that the planet is spinning faster or slower.

Unless.
Hypothetical scenario. A star is a massive ball of assorted gases, typically hydrogen, that got so big that its own gravity got so strong that it all caught on fire and started nuclear fusion. But if you shrink a star in scale, you reduce both its lifespan (it has less hydrogen to burn) and its mass (which means it will stop being on fire and will turn from plasma back into a cloud of not-burning gas). What if Equestria's sun is only about the size of its moon (I haven't done the maths yet to see how it would need to scale), and the magic that Celestia uses to control the sun's movement also adds hydrogen to it, removes helium after fusion (to keep mass constant) and keeps this 'micro-sun' concentrated enough to burn?
If that were the case, it would explain a lot. Celestia could make the year as long or as short as she wants, and any number of months with any number of holidays could fit into a calendar with no leap-years, because she can tailor the orbit to the calendar (rather than the other way around, which we have to do here). Heck, for that matter she could make the days and nights as long as she wanted (within reason). Equestria's world would be a rogue planet, with a tiny orbiting sun and moon à la Discworld (only spherical).

I'll stop this thought experiment here, because this thread is meant to be about holidays and I'm sitting here prattling on about using magic for stellar engineering and breaking the laws of physics. It's...tangentially related, I guess? And this is the group for weird ideas done seriously.